Enterprise Apps

With an attractive force akin to the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy, online social networks have pulled into their orbits scores of new startups searching for profits. The target: eyeballs. Last January, Facebook totaled 68 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views, and MySp...

PRM has an intriguing business case: It applies the concepts and tools of customer relationship management to the business relationships that also affect a company's customer base. The problem with PRM is that it hasn't caught on -- for myriad reasons, starting with its expense and difficulty in imp...

Josh Nankivel of PMStudent.com recently polled project managers about how the current economic climate is affecting them, and he found that 27 percent had experienced project cutbacks, 14 percent had experienced PM layoffs, 11 percent had experienced financial scrutiny of projects, and 10 percent ha...

When poet John Donne wrote, "No man is an island," he suggested that that all human beings are bound by the experiences of others. This timeless notion can also be applied to the business world: "No marketing channel is an island." When online information is examined on a larger scale across several...

I have been remiss in not paying enough attention to social media monitoring software. I suppose it's understandable given that social media is at the margin of CRM -- moving to the center, but still in the outer shell -- and monitoring software is somewhere beyond that orbit in the software equiva...

Nobody, not even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself, has yet successfully produced a proven, sustainable and scalable business model that can satisfactorily monetize the vast ecosystem of the social networks -- Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. The reason for this could be rooted in ...

The Business Intelligence space has been on a mission for several years. The goal: to simplify the way these applications work for the end-user. Several years ago, one practically needed a Ph.D. to be able to eke out usable data. Today, most line of business users can get the same results. Noetix is...

Right now, about 2 percent of the contact center infrastructure market uses Software as a Service, said inContact CEO Paul Jarman, citing research by Gartner. That statistic seems reasonable, given that the contact center infrastructure space has traditionally been dominated by on-premise players --...

The traditional sales pressures of lengthening sales cycles and low quota achievement have only been exacerbated by the recent economic downturn. Many businesses have been forced to cut costs, eliminate waste and often freeze spending. The few organizations that might be looking to spend are increas...

Companies deploy CRM solutions to improve business performance, maximize customer relationships and enhance customer service, but many deployments fail to meet expectations. There are many reasons technology rollouts fail, from lack of planning to lack of funding, but there's another, less-understoo...

Every small vendor -- no matter the industry -- dreams of landing at least one big name Fortune 500 client. Such a client, of course, would lend it the necessary street cred -- not to mention revenue -- that all smaller companies need. It also might open the door to new product development and distr...

While most believe that knowledge is indeed power and that knowing where one stands at any given moment is valuable information, not all companies are eagerly queuing to buy into business intelligence. "We are increasingly finding that those companies that are putting BI solutions in place for gener...

The dismal state of the economy is causing companies everywhere to reassess their marketing budgets to ensure that they're allocating their limited marketing funds in the most productive ways possible. In many cases, this means curtailing, postponing or even eliminating previously planned marketing ...

Having joined the business software company in 1996, George Klaus, chairman, president and CEO of Epicor, is hardly a newbie by industry standards. However, he tells CRM Buyer that all of his executive team has been with the company even longer -- long enough, in other words, to have weathered sever...

Once upon a time, business was done smartly and logically. New initiatives were part of long-term plans and all new ideas had to pass muster. Then came a period where a whiff of a trend meant change for change's sake, which was followed by a period most notable for its greed-fest. Combined, these la...